A High-Scale Assessment of Social Media and Mainstream Media in Scientific Communication

Résumé fourni par la source

The rapid growth of social media and contraction of mainstream media raises fundamental questions about the nature of science that is reported to the public. Examining 20.9 million scientific publications, we compare research coverage in social media and mainstream media in a broad corpus of scientific work. We find substantial shifts in the scale, impact, and heterogeneity of scientific coverage. First, social media significantly alters what science is, and is not, covered. Mainstream media accentuates eminence in the coverage of science and focuses on a limited set of fields. By contrast, social media reports research more evenly across fields, institutions of all prestige, journal rankings, and the demography of scholars while increasing the scale of scientific ideas covered more than eightfold. Second, despite concerns about the misrepresentation of science in social media, we find that social media typically covers works that are impactful and novel within science. Third, scientists on social media, as domain experts, tend to surface high-impact research in their own fields while sampling widely across research institutions. These findings reveal that social media expands and diversifies science reporting by highlighting high-impact research and bringing a broader array of scholars, institutions and scientific concepts into public view.

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